Presidential Politics Come To The Super Bowl
BY ADAM GROSSMAN
The presidential campaigns for both Donald Trump and Michael Bloomberg will each spend $10 million for sixty seconds of commercials during the Super Bowl broadcast this Sunday. Many have asked why these campaigns would spend so much money during an event that does seem applicable to politics. A strategic analysis of these ad buys shows why these campaigns specifically will benefit from these investments.
In The Sports Strategist: Developing Leaders For A High-Performance Industry, my co-authors and I highlighted work on the marginal voter in politics. Our goal was to show the importance of focusing on resources on the specific audiences whose opinions could be changed through marketing.
In politics, research into voting patterns shows that there are only certain percentage voters that can be persuaded to vote for a candidate through campaign activities. A rule of thumb has been that 80% of the electorate will only ever really vote for candidates from one of the two major parties (Democratic or Republican). The remaining 20% are marginal voters that can be persuaded to vote for a candidate from either party or an independent candidate. Targeting these voters is typically where modern political campaigns focus a significant portion of their efforts.
Both the Trump and Bloomberg campaigns appear to be focusing on marginal votes and are using Super Bowl advertising reach target them. Who is the marginal voter in presidential election? Pew Research conducted an analysis of exit polls after the 2016 presidential election to determine where Trump and Hillary Clinton over or underperformed with voter demographics as compared to the previous election 2012.
While conventional wisdom is that Trump campaign is often focused on reaching lower-educated, white voters, that is not true when it comes to marginal voters. Trump overperformed with this demographic in the 2016 election by significant margin (he had a 39-point advantage over Clinton). Trump‘s winning campaign underperformed with older demographics as compared to Mitt Romney’s losing campaign. Trump received three percent fewer votes in 2016 than Romney did in 2012 with this demographic.
Super Bowl 2019 overall television of audience of 98.2 million viewers was the lowest since 2008 with ratings hitting 25 year low for the 18-49 age range. That is actually a feature, rather than a bug, for the Trump campaign since one of its goals for the 2020 campaign is likely to target older voters as they are ones that could be persuaded to vote for Trump (as more did for Romney). This makes a Super Bowl ad more valuable to his campaign.
Similar logic can be applied to the Bloomberg campaign. Pew Research identified that the Clinton underperformed significantly with African American and Hispanic voters in 2016 as compared to Barack Obama in 2012. Block Six Analytics (B6A) Audience Inference Platform (AIP) has found evidence that NFL demographics are disproportionally African American and Hispanic as compared to the general population. In addition, the Super Bowl has consistently been the most watched non-soccer sports telecasts for both NBC Universo and ESPN Deportes. The Bloomberg campaign specifically has had difficulty engaging with these demographics thus far in the election cycle.
This highlights another attribute that both the Trump and Bloomberg campaigns share and is different than virtually every other candidate. B6A’s Corporate Asset Valuation Model (CAV) has three core value drivers – quantity, quality, and engagement. In past posts, we have focused primarily on quality and engagement. For both Trump and Bloomberg, however, achieving national scale is an important way to reach marginal voters at scale early in the election process.
Because his is the sitting President, Trump is not running against a significant challenger in the Republican Party primary. Therefore, the Trump campaign does not need to focus resources on specific states in early in the nominating process. The campaign can instead focus on reaching its targeted voter cohorts at a national scale with an emphasis on the general election.
Unlike every other Democratic candidate, Bloomberg is also taking a national approach even during primary season rather than focusing on individual states at the beginning of the process. More specifically, Bloomberg is not on the ballot in early nominating contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina.
The campaign instead is focusing on “Super Tuesday” where several states, including California, are voting on the same day relatively soon after the Super Bowl. The Bloomberg campaign believes that its success on Super Tuesday should be the critical factor in securing the nomination. The most Democratic delegates are available on this day (the candidates need to secure the majority of delegates to win the nomination) and many candidates will likely have dropped out by Super Tuesday. This means Bloomberg has the chance to secure the more delegates in a far less competitive environment than earlier states.
The campaign made this decision because the candidate is self-funding his efforts (Bloomberg has already spent over $250 million on his campaign). It does not need the financial resources that typically come from winning or doing well early primary states that other campaigns often require to win the nomination.
The Super Bowl is one way to reach all Super Tuesday states at the same time through one ad buy. The fact that the San Francisco 49ers are playing the Super Bowl will add extra value as local markets see ratings increases when its teams participate in the game. This is added value because the campaign made the decision to buy the ad time before knowing the 49ers would play in the Super Bowl.
Trump and Bloomberg share more in common than being septarian, billionaires from New York running for President. Both their campaigns appear to understand the importance of targeting marginal voters through purchasing Super Bowl Ads. In addition, the commercials will be more valuable to these specific campaigns given their goals of reaching national scale early in 2020 election cycle. Understanding these goals is critical to understanding why both the Trump and Bloomberg campaigns are making what appear to be atypical multimillion dollar ad purchases.